Keller Easterling’s Medium Design extends and refines her infrastructural philosophy by advancing a theory of spatial and organisational intelligence grounded not in objects or declarations, but in the latent dispositions of systems. Rejecting the modernist fixation on singular solutions, heroic innovations, and binary political antagonisms, Easterling argues that contemporary power increasingly operates through environmental matrices, organisational chemistries, and repeatable infrastructural formulas that quietly modulate behaviour over time. Medium design therefore concerns neither static form-making nor deterministic planning; rather, it manipulates the interplay, temperament, and latency embedded within sociotechnical organisations. Across the text, Easterling repeatedly insists that the most consequential forms of governance emerge not from overt laws or ideological proclamations but from subtle spatial protocols, interdependencies, and logistical arrangements that shape what becomes possible or impossible within a system. Her analysis of autonomous vehicles, migration systems, financial infrastructures, and urban morphologies demonstrates how apparently neutral organisational frameworks generate cascading political consequences through their dispositions rather than their stated intentions. Particularly significant is her emphasis on discrepancy—the split between what institutions claim to do and what their operational structures actually perform. In this sense, medium design becomes an epistemology of indirect action and distributed agency, privileging dynamic adjustments, counter-contagions, and adaptive protocols over revolutionary rupture or rigid master planning. Drawing upon Gregory Bateson, Bruno Latour, Michel Foucault, Gilbert Ryle, and Marshall McLuhan, Easterling synthesises cybernetics, media theory, urbanism, and political philosophy into a model of infrastructural aesthetics capable of addressing “superbugs” of contemporary governance such as platform monopolies, climate instability, migration crises, and algorithmic power. Ultimately, Medium Design reconceives design itself as a practice of modulating fields rather than composing isolated objects, transforming architecture and politics into arts of organisational disposition wherein the most effective interventions are often indirect, ambient, and strategically indeterminate.
Easterling, K. (2017) Medium Design. Moscow: Strelka Press.
